The two co-op modes cast players as F.E.A.R. The F.E.A.R squad members goal is to survive as long as possible, with the last surviving member given the chance to escape and win. The Spectre’s goal is to utilize the AI enemies on the map to take out the other players and turn them over to the Spectre side. Soul Survivor plays like a Vampire game where one player at the beginning of the round is chosen to be the Spectre with the rest of the players play F.E.A.R squad members. Soul King plays as a kind of a competitive collection game where all players play as Spectres who are trying to kill humans and collect the largest number of souls to win. You can also set the number of players anywhere between 2 and 4 (or even play a solo practice round if you’d like). Each multiplayer mode has three maps available for play with no overlapping of maps between modes, which is pretty nice. 3 provides a total of four multiplayer modes, two of them competitive (Soul King and Soul Survivor) and two of them co-operative (Contractions and F**king Run!). So what about the multiplayer, you ask? F.E.A.R. The checkpoints are frequent, though, so this isn’t usually an issue. Sometimes you can even shoot down helicopters with rocket launchers! These boss fights are usually pretty fun, but sometimes just what you’re supposed to do may be unclear and you may have to reload a few times when you both get incapped from some mech beams to the face. Chapters often supply something akin to a boss or a miniboss fight where the players must take down a mech or a souped-up Armacham soldier. The chapters do a good job of covering a diverse array of area types (from a warehouse to the highway to a residential area) and keeping the action going. I myself haven’t played any of the other F.E.A.R games and while I’m sure I missed some nuances in the story or nods to plots of previous games, I never felt completely lost as to what was going on. These cinematics do a decent job of tying the chapters together into a story, but the chapters themselves are usually more about the action and less about the story, which was fine by me.

Each chapter is sandwiched between two cinematics which are sometimes about events going on currently and sometimes reveal some details about the brothers’ pasts. 3 is divided into eight chapters total with the “target time” of each usually being somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes.

Fear 3 xbox360